The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

INDRA DEVI had two husbands and several paramours, but the great elusive love of her life was her mother. In stories about Devi’s childhood and adolescence, her mother is like a magical fairy, appearing suddenly, radiating glamour and adventure, and then disappearing just as quickly. Later, during the years after the Russian Revolution, Devi seemed to be forever searching for her through the cities of the disintegrating empire, following rumored sightings of her mother from place to place, occasionally catching up with her and her bohemian friends, and then losing her again.

  Devi distrusted psychoanalysis and never, even in her last years, dwelled on the past. She would have recoiled at the idea that her mother had wounded her in any serious way. Instead, she insisted that her mother showed her the importance of independence and of pursuing one’s passion. “As a child, I intuited that happiness only came to those that dared to follow their own path,” Devi writes. “I forged myself as an independent being, and I was never tied to a place, nor a religion.” She often spoke about the necessity of balancing love and detachment, a lesson she learned as much from her mother as from her later Indian gurus.

  Yet, while it’s true that Devi’s mother bequeathed her the spirit of freedom, Eugenia’s childhood was also marked by stretches of loneliness, loss, and terror, emotions that sent the young girl searching for spiritual comfort. There’s an inadvertently heartbreaking moment in her memoir when she recalls being arrested and imprisoned with her mother after sneaking across a frozen river forming the Russian and Polish borders. It’s sad not because Eugenia was traumatized by captivity but because she found it, somehow, sweet. Finally, she writes, she and her mother had the opportunity to connect, to talk at length and support each other through their difficulties.

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  Sasha Zitovich, a sixteen-year-old Russian aristocrat, gave birth to Eugenia Vassilievna in the spring of 1899 in the Latvian city of Riga, then part of the Russian Empire. According to the old-fashioned Julian calendar that was used in Russia before the revolution, Eugenia’s birthday was May 12 (April 30 on the Gregorian calendar we use today). Her father was Vasili Pavlovich Peterson, a middle-aged banker of Swedish origin. Evidently Sasha’s father, Count Vasili Mijailovich Zitovich, thought that Peterson offered stability for his strong-willed daughter. Yet the marriage quickly fell apart, and not long after Eugenia’s first birthday, her mother and father separated, and Sasha returned to her father’s house.

  At the time, Eugenia was already living with her grandparents. Sasha had allowed them to nurse her daughter through an infant illness, and week after week, they begged Sasha to let the baby stay just a little longer. Eventually, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, it was decided that Eugenia would remain permanently with Sasha’s parents, and they coddled her through her infancy.

  A member of the czar’s administration, Eugenia’s grandfather worked for the police department, and the family lived in a stately home attached to one of the department’s district headquarters. It was a grand three-story brick building in a bucolic part of the city, by the Daugava River, which at the time was clean enough for swimming. The building is still standing, though today it’s abandoned, carpeted inside with garbage, its façade adorned with graffiti, the area around it desolate. Back then, though, cobblestone streets and small wooden houses surrounded it. To Eugenia, it seemed a grand mansion.

  Riga was then a cosmopolitan and quickly growing city, the largest in the Baltics, with communities of ethnic Latvians, Russians, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews. Its port was one of the most important in the Russian Empire, a hub for the trade of both raw materials and delicacies from European colonies—coffee, cocoa, spices, fruits. All sorts of European languages were heard in the streets. The city was highly literate, with as many as two hundred places to buy books and a vibrant and rapidly expanding theater scene, nurtured by local artists and visiting performers from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. Across the river from the Zitovich home, gorgeous Art Nouveau buildings were being erected on the city’s broad avenues, their ornate façades decorated with flowers, angels, gargoyles, and goddesses.

  For Sasha, trapped at home, her romantic life officially over before she’d turned eighteen, the urban ferment on the other side of the Daugava must have been a constant temptation, and her existence with her family stifling. But Devi remembered life in her grandparents’ house as a perpetual celebration. There was a constant stream of guests, endless parties and receptions. Summers were spent in Jūrmala, a nearby spa town fronting a long, sandy beach.

  Not long after Sasha’s arrival, Sasha’s sister, Marusia, fled her own unhappy marriage to join them, bringing her baby son, Nicolas, with her and providing Eugenia with a permanent playmate. Eugenia had no chores; servants did all the housework. Her adoring grandfather lavished her with dolls and dresses. He was strict only about her studies, so much so that by the time she started school at age ten, she could already read German and French in addition to Russian.

  Eugenia’s father had completely vanished from her life; she didn’t even know what he looked like. One time, her nanny showed her a photo of the famed Russian opera singer Leonid Sobinov and said that he was her father. Her grandmother later disabused her of this; still, whenever Eugenia thought of her father, Sobinov’s darkly handsome, dreamy-eyed image came to mind. She wasn’t particularly bothered by his absence—if anything, she feared the prospect of one day being forced to meet him, a virtual stranger.

  Yet when her mother disappeared, that was agonizing. Sasha had always dreamed of becoming an actress, but her father found the idea of his daughter onstage intolerable. In aristocratic circles, acting was considered a thoroughly disreputable profession, barely a step above prostitution. She was determined, though, and one night when Eugenia was a small child, Sasha packed a bag and ran away from home, joining a small touring theater company in another city.

  In her memoir, Devi says that even then she admired her mother for “going totally against the conventions of the epoch and doing what her heart dictated.” Yet with her mother gone, she was plagued by inexplicable terrors and constant anxiety. She was afraid of death, afraid that her mother would die, terrified that her nanny would abandon her. An organ grinder used to visit her grandfather’s house with his pet monkey, who carried a red bag and wore a military hat. In Eugenia’s macabre dreams, the monkey became a murderous beast. The silhouette of a basket floating in the Daugava River looked to her like a corpse. Worst of all was the sight of coffins, which paralyzed her with an overwhelming, lifelong fear of being buried alive.

  Sasha had little contact with her family until a serious illness brought her own mother, Eugenia’s grandmother, to her hospital bedside. There was a rapprochement, and Sasha’s parents grudgingly accepted her stage career. After that, Sasha would return home when she wasn’t touring, thrilling her daughter. She’d adopted the stage name Alexandra Labunskaia, and Eugenia saw her as a great star. This was probably an exaggeration, though it is doubtless Sasha had admirers. Whereas Eugenia would always be slight, her mother was broad shouldered and fashionably zaftig, with full lips and a direct, flirtatious gaze. A review of one of her performances praised her “décolleté,” while another noted her enticing “coquettish gestures.”

  Like many aristocratic girls, Eugenia was educated at home, though she longed to go to school. In the afternoons, she would sit by the window and listen with envy to the voices of children returning from their studies. Finally, her ceaseless pleading to her grandparents paid off, and when she was ten, she was enrolled in secondary school. There she insisted that she was Eugenia Labunskaia, not Peterson, and that no one was to call her by her father’s surname. It was the first of what were to be many reinventions.

  She loved school, and most subjects save mathematics came easy to her—though, just to be sure, she and her friends would eat five-petal lilacs before exams, a superstition meant to ensure good grades. After classes, Eugenia would walk home with her best friend, Nina Tretiakovy, and Nina’s older brother V
ava, who went to school nearby. Eugenia loved their big, lively house, where the kids (seven in all) seemed to have the run of the place. Though generally shy, there she was uninhibited. Vava always had a talent for wordplay, and he would sit at the piano improvising funny songs while Nina and Eugenia danced along.

  No one would have guessed that Eugenia, alternately insecure and headstrong, would one day be admired as a spiritual leader. If anything, she was a bit of a brat, furiously impatient when forced to wait for her servants to clean or iron her clothes. For an aristocratic only child, perhaps this wasn’t unusual, but looking back almost a century later, she writes, “I also want it known that I recognize myself as terribly human, with all the debilities belonging to humanity. I don’t have a trace of sainthood.”

  In the summer of 1910, Eugenia’s nanny took her and her cousin, Nicolas, to visit her mother in Sevastopol, a Crimean resort city on the Black Sea. Eugenia thrilled to witness the fans who came to stand outside her mother’s hotel window, the delirious applause at the theaters, and the heaps of proffered flowers onstage.

  As Eugenia entered adolescence, the cozy, protective world of her childhood began to fall apart. Her grandfather had a stroke and died when she was twelve, and the constant anxiety that plagued her intensified. Nicolas departed for military school, returning on holidays transformed from a sweet companion into a swaggering, supercilious bully who enjoyed humiliating her by belting out obscene songs. As she lost those around her, her mother’s visits became more and more important to her. Eugenia loved to stand by her side at the piano in her family’s salon, luxuriating in the timbre of her mother’s voice.

  In her early teens, Eugenia was allowed to visit Sasha when she was performing in Moscow. They would stay at the famed Hotel Metropol, a sumptuously decorated Art Nouveau palace full of gothic pinnacles and soaring atriums, with ultramodern conveniences such as telephones and hot running water. In the evenings they’d sometimes visit the nearby Bolshoi Theatre. Eugenia remembered the excitement of strolling hand in hand through the city with Sasha, stopping at restaurants and bohemian cafés, and being delighted when strangers recognized her mother. Walking beside Sasha, her own bearing proud and her chin aloft, she felt like a bit of a star herself.

  It was in Moscow, during the winter of 1914, that Eugenia first came across the word yoga. World War I had started that July, and on the front, Russian soldiers were dying by the hundreds of thousands. Yet such suffering seemed far away. In Moscow, sleighs plied the snowbound streets, and Eugenia would accompany her mother on afternoon visits to the homes of friends, where they’d drink tea for hours before crackling fires.

  One day, at the house of one of her mother’s actor friends, Eugenia slipped away and found his enormous library, with volumes crammed onto floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. On a desk were two that seemed particularly well thumbed. One was by the Indian poet and novelist Rabindranath Tagore, who had, the previous year, become the first South Asian to win the Noble Prize in Literature. The second was Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism, by Yogi Ramacharaka.

  As the title promises, the book deals more with philosophy and occultism than physical practice; one of its chapters is subtitled “Clairvoyance, Clairaudience, Psychometry, Telepathy, etc.—How to Develop Psychic Powers.” It does, however, offer a tantalizing hint of the discipline that would reshape Eugenia’s life. “The care of the body, under the intelligent control of the mind, is an important branch of yogi philosophy, and is known as ‘Hatha Yoga,’ ” Ramacharaka writes. “We are preparing a little text-book upon ‘Hatha Yoga,’ which will soon be ready for the press, that will give the Yogi teachings upon this most important branch of self-development.”

  Just as Eugenia sat down to read Ramacharaka’s book, her mother’s friend entered the room. “Aha! I see that you have discovered the most precious book in my collection,” he said. And taking the book from her, he began to read. The dancing light of a nearby fire flickered in the room, and as the actor pronounced the strange, mysterious words, Eugenia’s cheeks burned. Suddenly, surprising herself with her own ardor, she announced, “I have to go to India!”

  With a wary look, he closed the book. “You are too emotional, my dear,” he said.

  Actually, the author of Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism wasn’t from India. Yogi Ramacharaka was a nom de plume of William Walker Atkinson, who lived in Chicago. Atkinson was a leading proponent of New Thought, a kind of proto-self-help movement that claimed that the power of the mind could control external events. His books included Thought Force in Business and Everyday Life and Dynamic Thought; or, the Law of Vibrant Energy. When he published his book about hatha yoga, the exercises he described hardly resembled traditional asanas, or yoga poses. “Swing back the hands until the arms stand out straight…The arms should be swung with a rapid movement, and with animation and life. Do not go to sleep over the work, or rather play,” he writes.

  It was fitting that his book should fall into Eugenia’s hands, since the strange coupling of Indian spirituality and Occidental self-improvement was to be a major theme in her life.

  Such a book wasn’t out of place in the library of a Russian actor of the time. Russia’s Silver Age, an extraordinarily rich, romantic period of artistic innovation that began around the turn of the twentieth century, was saturated with spiritualism, Eastern religion, and esoteric magic. “The shelves of the Russian philosophical bookshops of that day abounded in works on Oriental mysticism, Buddhism, Vedanta and Yoga, when Western Europe still had but scant acquaintance with these subjects,” writes Sir Paul Dukes, a famed British spy and yoga aficionado whose own metaphysical explorations began in prerevolutionary Riga and St. Petersburg.

  Between 1881 and 1918, more than eight hundred occult books appeared in Russia. The work of Papus, a leading French occultist, was widely available, and he became a significant adviser to Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra (though nowhere nearly as important to them as the debauched monk Rasputin). In St. Petersburg, hundreds turned out for Theosophical lectures at the Tenishev School, a prestigious private secondary school—Vladimir Nabokov was enrolled there—with one of the best auditoriums in the city.

  Of all the esoteric spiritual associations flourishing in Russia during Eugenia’s adolescence, Theosophy, the grandmother of today’s New Age movements, was the most widespread, particularly among elites. Though born in America, it had Russian roots: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, its founder, was, like Eugenia, the child of Russian aristocrats. Madame Blavatsky, as she was called, was a fat, chain-smoking, riotously vulgar spiritualist, usually dressed in shapeless black clothes and bedecked with shawls and baubles. Her father was a Russian soldier descended from a family of minor German nobles; her mother, from a more august line, was a novelist and early feminist. By the time Blavatsky arrived in the United States via Paris in 1873, the story she told about her life was a glittery farrago of the factual and fantastical. It’s a fact that in 1849, when she was seventeen, she married Nikifor Blavatsky, vice governor of Yerevan in the Caucasus, and that she fled from him a few months later, choosing to set off alone for Constantinople rather than return to her father. After that, myth and history become more entangled.

  Blavatsky claimed to have traveled the world studying with various spiritual teachers, including Sufi pirs, Egyptian Kabbalists, voodoo priests in New Orleans, and, most important, a Tibetan by the name of Master Morya, with whom, she said, she’d apprenticed in the Himalayas for seven years. In between, there were more worldly adventures. In his splendid book Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, historian Peter Washington writes that she professed “to have ridden bareback in a circus, toured Serbia as a concert pianist, opened an ink factory in Odessa, traded as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris, and worked as interior decorator to the Empress Eugénie.” She had scars that she claimed came from fighting alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian revolutionary hero. She supported herself, in part, as an itinerant clairvoyant. “S
he may or may not have had lovers,” writes Washington, “including the German Baron Meyendorf, the Polish Prince Wittgenstein and a Hungarian opera singer, Agardi Metrovich.” She may have given birth to one or two illegitimate children, though, if she did, their whereabouts are unknown.

  Arriving in New York, Blavatsky sought to establish herself as a medium. By most accounts, her belief in the reality of hidden worlds and esoteric secrets was sincere, but she was also canny, ambitious, and more than willing to engage in tricks to convince others of her abilities. For a woman with few resources save eclectic religious knowledge, charisma, and bravado, spiritualism offered rare and potentially lucrative career opportunities. It was one of the few fields where women, thought to possess greater intuition than men, were at an advantage.

  In the United States, Blavatsky soon joined forces with Henry Steele Olcott, an agricultural expert, lawyer, Civil War veteran, and journalist. Olcott was a successful and established man—he was a member of the three-man board appointed to investigate Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. It’s less surprising than it might seem that he would get involved with Blavatsky. At the time, many serious people took spiritualism seriously. In 1854, Senator James Shields, a Democrat from Illinois, presented a petition on the Senate floor, signed by fifteen thousand American spiritualists, demanding a “scientific commission” to investigate communication with the dead. Spiritualism continued to grow after the American Civil War, fed by people’s desperation to hear from their lost loved ones. First Lady Mary Lincoln held séances at the White House in an attempt to contact her dead son. Major newspapers ran dispatches about spiritual manifestations.

  One evening in September 1875, a small group, including Olcott, gathered in the parlor of Madame Blavatsky’s apartment on Irving Place in Manhattan. They were there to hear a lecture on something called “The Lost Canon of Proportion,” a kind of esoteric Egyptian geometry. (In the Western imagination, Egypt preceded India as a seat of mysterious secret wisdom, and Kabbalah-inspired speculation about quasi-magical mathematical formulas was popular in many occultist circles.)